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Thursday, November 1, 2012

We are thrilled to announce that, following our tour of Romanian cities this spring, Our School is expanding to additional cities in Romania this fall, with our partners at One World Romania On Tour. We'll be screening in the following new cities:

Finally, Our School will later become available for streaming in Romania on the WebKino platform launched by our distributor, Cristian Mungiu's Voodoo Films. We will update the launch date and post the text code for accessing the film as soon as they become available.

We have reached out to Swiss teachers' groups, human rights organizations and authorities to make the best use of the film as a springboard for a broader discussion about Roma integration and the pressing issue of overcoming prejudice in Switzerland, where Roma migrants often face backlash.

Here is a partial list of Swiss screenings lined up for this fall:

Haute école pédagogique Vaud in Lausanne shows excerpts of the film on Sun, Sept 22 at 2pm at UNIL, Dorigny, as part of the Assises romandes de l'éducation, which focus this year on school integration; a full screening follows in the evening, with a discussion conducted by Miruna Coca-Cozma

Our School is this year's opening film for the CinéBrunch Regards d'Ailleurs series in Fribourg on Sat, Oct 13 at 11am at Cinemotion Rex; Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma follows the screening

Centre de Culture ABC in La-Chaux-de-Fonds will follow a screening on Tue, Oct 23 at 5:30pm with a round table on Roma integration with the participation of Amnesty
International Switzerland, the President of the Neuchâtel State Council and the Head of
the Department of Education, representatives of the Lausanne Police, and director Miruna
Coca-Cozma; Our School will also screen at ABC on Sat, Oct 27 and Sun, Oct 28 at 4pm

Cinéma de Cossonay shows Our School on Wed, Oct 24 at 8:30pm, again with a Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma

The wonderful arthouse cinema Kino Kunstmuseum in Berne will show Our School on Fri, Nov 2 at 6:30pm, Sat, Nov 3 at 6pm (followed by Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma), Sun, Nov 4 at 4:30pm (also followed by Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma), as well as Wed, Nov 7 at 6:30pm

Finally, we're returning to the Carouge Cinéma Bio 72 in Geneva, where the film ran for seven consecutive weeks this spring, for an educational screening with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma on Tues, Nov 13, at 11am

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Last year we had the honor of presenting Our School
in the Romanian film festival in New York at the Walter Reade Theater,
on the Romania's national day. Director Mona Nicoara, who lives in New York, had been attending the festival for many years. It is by far the most exciting and innovative
Romanian cultural event in the city, with a fantastic audience,
outstanding industry presence, excellent press coverage from the NYTimes
to the Village Voice, and, last but not least, a great line-up of New
Wave movies curated by a team of Lincoln Center Film Society and
Transylvania International Film Festival programmers.

Recently, the Romanian Cultural Institute, which until last year
funded the event, has fallen victim to political changes and culture
wars raging back in Bucharest. You can find a good overview of the
situation published by New York Times earlier this summer here.
Since then, the Institute's programs for the remainder of this year
have been defunded, its leadership replaced with throwbacks to
Communist-era ideologues, and its mission changed to, for instance,
producing a series of documentaries called "Treasures of the
Carpathians." Just today, the newly appointed head of the Institute
announced in an interview
that he wants to shift the focus from film and the arts to promoting
Romania's contributions to science and technology like the...radiator.
It sounds funny, but for those of us who remember Romania before 1989,
it is sadly familiar.

Luckily, the team who founded the festival is working hard to keep
it going, with support from the Lincoln Center Film Society, private
foundations, and Romanian artists. But they need to fill their budget
gap through crowd funding. They just launched a Kickstarter campaign, which we supported by volunteering to produce the video below.

Please donate
and spread the word. Every bit, from anywhere in the world, counts, and
every supporter and gesture of solidarity is an important victory for
Romanian artists and filmmakers, and for the dedicated New York audience
of this festival. A dollar a day keeps the radiators away.

We will add screenings to this post as we go along. Please keep an eye on our UPCOMING SCREENINGS tab on the right for more screenings, including advocacy, community and educational screenings outside the festival circuit, and new cinema releases.

Reality shows feed on stereotypes and disdain for tribes other than one's own. Most people in the US know of Jersey Shore, which generated a debate around the representation of Italian-Americans on television. There are many more like it: The Littlest Groom (which plays on stereotypes about little people), My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé (overweight people) and, yes, the unfortunately and descriptively titled Black Mafia Family Wives.

Now comes National Geographic's new reality series, American Gypsies,
launched on the heels of TLC's ongoing My Big Fat American Gypsy
Wedding, itself a spin-off of the UK's Channel 4's enormously successful
Big Fat Gypsy Weddings.
Sadly, this spate of exoticising voyeurism has nothing to do with
genuine interest in Roma or Travellers, the two ethnic groups lumped
together under the term "Gypsy" (a term considered derogatory by most
Roma activists). Rather, it has everything to do with the chase for
ratings, which is at the heart of the tabloidisation of television
everywhere. Consequently, these shows are built on tried and true
tropes: broad stereotypes, artificially constructed conflicts,
unidimensional characters, set-up scenes and scripted lines.

Accuracy
is beside the point: these shows are invested in reproducing a version
of what it means to be a "Gypsy" that broadcasters believe to be most
comfortable for their audience – Esmeralda-like headscarves, belly
dancing, innate violence, gaudy parties, psychic healing parlours. The teaser
for the series manages to cram all of those cliches into one minute,
with time to spare. The response has been predictable: within a day,
online comments were rife with racial slurs and no small number of
sympathetic references to Hitler.

I have seen this dynamic before.
I grew up in an atmosphere permeated by the kind of stereotypes about
violent, dirty and scheming "Gypsies" that abound in Europe. I am
ethnically Romanian and grew up in Romania, where Roma were enslaved
until the 1860s and deported to extermination camps during the second
world war. The few who remained nomadic were forcibly settled during
communism. Then, many were chased out of villages during violent, deadly
pogroms in the 1990s. To this day, Roma children are shunted into
dead-end segregated schools which trap them in the vicious cycle of
poverty and disenfranchisement.

Yet Roma continue to be
blamed for living at the edge of society. Reality shows perpetuate this
fiction of self-segregation by stressing difference and tradition, by
recasting the viewers' ignorance as secrecy on the part of the Roma and
by artificially presenting the preservation of ethnic identity as
radically opposed to those elements that make up our common humanity:
curiosity and learning, making new friends, falling in love. American
Gypsies begins by pronouncing: "For over 1,000 years, Romany or Gypsy
people have remained hidden from view. Until now" then proceeds to
repeatedly flash info-cards on the fear of outsiders and the mating
habits of Roma in their natural habitat. Fittingly, the tagline for this
new show is "You Don't Know Gypsy." In the UK, the last season of
Channel 4's Big Fat Gypsy Weddings was announced by billboards touting
it as "Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier." Try that out with other minorities.
Really, see how it feels.

These shows are especially
harmful because Roma people do not have any alternative representations
in the public's imagination. There is no Roma equivalent to Leonardo da
Vinci or Joe DiMaggio, to Rosa Parks or Barack Obama. In the US, where
there is very little awareness of Roma, My Big Fat American Gypsy
Wedding and American Gypsies will likely turn ignorance into all-out
prejudice. In the UK, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings has already led to a spike
in bullying of Roma and Traveller children. Elsewhere in eastern Europe,
where it has been syndicated, the franchise will only fan the flames of
violent racism by playing into the hands of skinheads and nationalists.

I
know there are other, much more rewarding ways to treat the subject for
a general audience. In 2006, I took a small crew to a tiny town in
Transylvania to follow a group of Roma children who were taken out of a
crumbling segregated school into a Romanian-led school, where they faced
further rejection and humiliation. Over the course of five years, we
worked with the conviction that audiences would be interested in
connecting to the day-to-day lives of Roma and exploring the complexity
of race relations. It paid off: in the 30 countries where we screened
over the past year, sold-out rooms engaged with our film
in lively discussions that sometimes stretched for hours. We found
mainstream audiences thrilled to be thinking for themselves, open to
exploring their own contribution to inequality, and moved by our shared
humanity.

We should give ourselves more credit: we have
shown that we can break through patterns of oppression several times
over the course of history. Little by little, the way we treat and
understand Roma will change, inexorably for the better. It is a shame
that television will have to catch up to this, instead of leading the
way.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Wonderful news today - Our School has been awarded Best International Feature at the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival in Australia! We are honored to have been selected from a stellar line-up, and to have been so warmly received by the jury and by public of the festival! We are also grateful for having had the chance to screen in multiple cities on the continent: Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. We'd be hard pressed to find places more remote from Târgu Lăpuș, where Alin, Beni, and Dana live, so it's particularly thrilling to know that the story of these three children resonated for the audiences of the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

We're finally coming to a broad audience in eight cities in Romania! Over the next month, Our School will be touring Romania with Zilele Filmului Românesc, a caravan of the best Romanian documentaries organized by Voodoo Films, the distribution company started by Romanian Palme d'Or-winning director Cristian Mungiu to bring Romanian films to under-served regions of the country.

Our School be screening in Ploieşti, Botoşani, Râmnicu Vâlcea, Piteşti, Baia Mare, and Bucharest between May 23 and June 29, alongside two other beautiful Romanian films: Dieter Auner's Off the Beaten Track and Anca Damian's Crulic. You can find a complete schedule of screenings here.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Our School is part ofReel Education, a
collective of nine documentary film projectsthat provide a nuanced and compelling
portrait of education. Using powerful personal stories, and highlighting themes that range
from closing achievement gaps to the protection of funding for after-school
programs, each of thesefilms
has the power to influence a small corner of the national conversation on
education and to engage people in action. But pooled together and positioned
into the work of organizations and other leaders who share their collective
vision, the impact of our media can be amplified.

We are collaborating with Working Films to identify communities
across the country that could benefit from using the Reel Education films in
their advocacy, training, or organizing efforts. We want to know which of these
project are most closely aligned with the issues at play in your community and
how film screenings could advance your work. So please take a few moments to check out the trailers for
all of the amazing film projects and then answer this short survey.

In March 2012, the Romanian Minister of Education made a loud, public commitment to include Our School into national teacher training curricula at all levels. This had been the intention all along, since starting out development work on the film back in 2005: To get Our School into the education systems of those countries where the issue of racial segregation of Roma in school was the most pressing. But the long way here has been neither straight nor obvious.

I came to the project as a human rights activist who had done extensive work on Roma rights. I knew the issue, knew pretty much everyone working on it — and had their support. I really thought that we’d be pretty much snap our fingers when the film was finished — and all the NGOs working on Roma education would rush to snatch the film from our hands and screen it for decision-makers all over Europe.

To be fair, some of that happened, right away: The London Secretariat of Amnesty International came on board after seeing a fine cut of the film, and have remained faithful partners for more than a year, encouraging their country groups to co-present some of our national premieres, organizing panels and Q&As, and taking the film over after our festival premieres for community screenings in places like Denmark, Greece or France. Works like a dream.

But we had some early wake-up calls, too: Our world premiere, scheduled simultaneously with a long-overdue review of the Czech Republic and Greece’s compliance with European Court of Human Rights judgments on school segregation, fell short of expectations. The Prague festival where we premiered was run by an organization that had just left an NGO coalition for desegregation in the Czech Republic — so it became clear, very quickly, that they were not going to promote the film. The local NGOs were busy waging war on the recent appointment of right-wing extremists in the Ministry of Education. Bringing decision-makers into a screening room was out of the question. And then there was the Czech press, which turned out to be more excited about films they had heard about from other festivals coming to Prague than about a world premiere which was, in their view, untested. (Lest this sound like a total failure, let me add this: The audience was just fantastic — warm, engaged and supportive.)

We learned two lessons: First, we needed to concentrate on making Our School a success as a film before it could be taken seriously as a tool. In the countries where we want to work most, there is no established culture of using documentaries as tools for change. For people to even begin to consider the social value of the film, we needed to first command as much of an artistic spotlight as we could. And, second, we needed to time events not so much around obvious advocacy opportunities as around the needs of our partner organizations. If that means waiting, so be it.

Some time towards the end of our first year out in the world, the invitations we had been seeking all along started coming in — from the various intergovernmental organizations which form the alphabet soup ruling Europe, from major funders and donor agencies, and from local partners who had very clear ideas of how Our School could be of use to them. It’s not always easy to work around our partners’ schedules to coordinate these actions with our continuing festival run (and try to get as much bang from our travel bucks as possible) — but, somehow, by hook or by crook, we’ve been able to make it work each time we needed to.

The screening we had in March in Bucharest is a very good example of that. The film had been in various festivals in Romania for nine months, gathering interest and momentum. As we were trying to figure out the best timing for an advocacy screening in Bucharest, an invitation to take part in the One World Romania festival arrived. We knew right away that this was a good fit: This is an strong, intelligently programmed and socially engaged festival (the proportion of consequential Chicken and Egg and Sundance Documentary Fund-supported projects selected each year would be downright funny if it didn’t make perfect sense). They had a history of organizing high-profile public debates around documentary films — and they were willing to do the same for Our School.

We a few loyal partners on the ground, starting with Romani CRISS, the most prominent Roma NGO in Romania, who had also helped us jump-start the project and served as our fiscal sponsor during production; and the Roma Education Fund, one of our earliest funders, whose leadership had already been co-hosting screenings of Our School in the US Congress, at the opening of the Verzio festival in Budapest, and before a crowd of pro bono lawyers and Roma rights activists in Berlin. However, while these NGOs were strong on substance and more than happy to help, neither of them had the experience or staff capacity to organize a high-profile advocacy event around a documentary film. That task fell to ActiveWatch, a media-monitoring agency who had the substance, experience, capacity, and convening power to pull off such an event. Most importantly, they had Teo, a whip-smart and devastatingly organized staff member with whom, over the couple of months leading up to the event, I ended up talking probably more than I got to talk to my own family. That’s really what it takes to make these things happen.

It was all going according to plan until the Minister of Education changed, unexpectedly, one month before our screening. I knew the previous Minister (we had grown up in the same town and our parents knew each other). He was aware of the film. I knew he has interested in Roma education issues. The new Minister, however, was a total mystery. But he reacted very openly when approached, and promised to come to the screening. We kept our fingers crossed that the screening would actually stay on his schedule, and even managed to get a brief meeting with him the day before to confirm his presence, and make sure he understands the set-up of the event. Other officials, however, were less responsive: The President’s Office, the relevant Parliament committees, the Members of the European Parliament representing Romania did not send anyone to the screening, and it wasn’t for lack of trying on our (actually mostly Teo’s) part.

When screening time came around, we had an incredible energy in the room - the anticipation and support in Bucharest had been growing for almost one year, and it paid off big time for us. The 350-seat room was packed to the gills, with people jockeying for standing room. During the debate following the film, the Ministry committed to making Our School part of the teacher training curricula by the start of the new school year. The National Council for Combating Discrimination asked for DVDs that they could start using in training programs the following week. And the Pedagogical Sciences program at the Bucharest University asked for a screening in two days. It’s hard to even imagine a stronger commitment from government agencies and relevant authorities - but it all came about in large part because we waited for the right opportunity and had the right partners on board.

We were lucky in other ways too: The next week we were able to present our campaigning goals in the Good Pitch2 organized during the Movies That Matter festival in the Hague. The timing could not have been better, coming off the success of our Romanian efforts. We were able to garner interest from new funders who offered to supplement the audience engagement and advocacy grants we received from the Sundance Documentary Fund and the Open Society Institute. One of our earliest funders in Romania, UNICEF, offered to take the film on at a regional level.

Finally, we received an invitation to do what we had been hoping to be able to do with this film since 2005: screen it before European Union officials in Brussels. That’s coming up in May, together with an effort to replicate our work in Romania in Hungary, and, hopefully, as more grants come in, to other places where school segregation of Roma is a burning issue: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, but also Italy and France.

It is exciting, but also daunting: There is an awful lot of countries where we need to do this kind of work. We have already been on the road with the film for over a year, yet we’re looking down the barrel of at least another year of this kind of work — and that’s after working six years to make the darn film. Thankfully, it’s worth it. And that’s what has been keeping us going all along, from the very beginning.

A Romanian public television show, Rom European, dedicated to Our School's special screening in Bucharest may give you a flavor of the event:

Monday, April 9, 2012

On April 8, International Roma Day, we had an additional reason to celebrate: Our School received the Graine de Cinéphage award at Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil. The award is given by the youth jury of the venerable festival, and has additional, hopeful
meaning given the recent history of Romanian Roma in France. We are honored and grateful - to the youth jury, the festival itself, and the our wonderful partners at Amnesty International France, who co-hosted our screenings there. We cannot wait to share with Alin, Beni and Dana the news that their
story is valued by young film lovers!

Friday, March 2, 2012

We're thrilled to announce the theatrical release of Our School in Switzerland, beginning with March 14th, 2012, at Cinéma BIO in Geneva and Zinéma in Laussane. Miruna Coca-Cozma will be present to launch the film and do Q&As - she will be in Geneva on March 14th and in Laussane on March 15th.

Update: As of early May, Our School has already had a seven-week run in Suisse Romande, and has been extended through May 8 at Cinema Bio in Geneva.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

We thought that the spring festival season would be slower, one year after our premiere. But it's even busier than the fall - 15 festivals and counting. Here is the first batch confirmed for Spring 2012:

Thrilled to be in these great events - as well as in series screenings at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Sattya Arts Collective in Nepal, MIT, and others. We will update and expand this list in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the UPCOMING SCREENINGS tab on the right side of the screen for specific times and places, as well as for miscellaneous other screenings outside the festival circuit.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Wonderful news: This morning we were nominated in the Best Documentary category of Romanian Gopo Awards (Premiile Gopo)! It's fantastic to see Alin, Beni and Dana's story included among the best Romanian films of last year. We are honored and moved to be nominated, and thrilled to be in the company of such wonderful Romanian documentaries as Radu Muntean's Visiting Hours.

The Gopos were set up in 2006 to reward the best Romanian film productions of each year - of which there is quite a bit these days: Past winners include 12:08 East of Bucharest, Palme d'Or Winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Emmy-winner The World According to Ion B, and the fantastic Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu.

The Gopos were named after Romanian animation artist and Palme d'Or winner Ion Popescu Gopo, whose iconic character serves as the award statue. He's sort of an inverted Oscar: Equally bold and naked and shiny, he's a lot less muscular or broad-shouldered, sporting instead a pot belly to balance his large, puzzled head.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Last night we had an epic screening in the Festival Étoiles Francophones, in the words of Miruna Coca-Cozma: The boiler in the Magic Cinéma de Bobigny
broke on account of the freezing temperatures, and the entire audience dutifully marched
to a nearby library.

Everyone stayed for the screening and the Q&A,
despite the cold and the unusual logistics. We had an animated after-screening debate with Julie Biro from CCFD-Terre Solidaire, Director Miruna Coca-Cozma, and Philippe Goossens from Amnesty International France - and a fully defrosted audience. We were especially honored by the presence and participation of teachers working with Roma children (from Romania and elsewhere) in integrated schools in Bobigny.

We clearly have an audience that's not only devoted, but very disciplined and patient. Grand merci! And thank you to the
organizers of the festival, Cousu Main, for making this possible against
the odds, to the Elsa Triolet Library for their last-minute hospitality, and to
our partners at Amnesty International for being there for us, as always.

This is by no means our last screening in France - but it will certainly be the most memorable!

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Upcoming Screenings

About the film

Award-winning documentary about three Roma (“Gypsy”) children who participate in a project to desegregate the local school in their small Transylvanian town, struggling against tradition and bigotry with humor, optimism and sass. Shot over four years, the film tells a captivating, bitter-sweet and often funny story about hope, race and opportunities.